December 21, 2012

First 3-D Printed Records Sound Awful—And Amazing

Smells Like Teen Spirit written by Kurt Cobain, is part of the batch of the first records ever to be created on a 3-D printer. Wired reports.

It’s surprising how much you can deform and down-sample an audio file and still recognize it,” says Amanda Ghassaei, assistant tech editor at Instructables, who printed the record, and several others, including music from the Pixies, Daft Punk, and Radiohead.

Ghassaei used a state-of-the-art Objet Connex 500 printer to generate the disc. For her printed records, Ghassaei sets the machine to its finest setting, 600 dpi, with 16 micron steps, about the highest quality available on the market. But it’s still far lower resolution than on a vinyl LP, by a factor of 10 or so.

... “It’s really stripped down, it’s down to the bare essentials,” she says. “It’s never going to be as good as vinyl. It’s not really set up for that. But it’s cool because you can really be creative with it."